I'm a technologist, and my interests lie at the point of fusion between technology, finance and innovation. I'm Deputy Director for the "Financial Services for the Poor" initiative at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. I'm the author of The Castle And The Sandbox, a book on how to innovate in conservative companies. Previously I was the co-founder of Innotribe, the initiative for collaborative innovation in the financial industry, and chief architect of SWIFTNet, SWIFT's worldwide secure network currently connecting 8,000 banks and 1,000 corporations, and servicing daily the world economy. You can find me on Twitter: copernicc, and Google+ .

The Castle And The Sandbox: How To Innovate In Established Companies

A lot of things happened since I started this blog, and wrote this inaugural post. The experience I gained, and the dialogue with you – my readers and real-life or social media friends – inspired me to write a book. The book, “The Castle And The Sandbox”, builds on the idea explained in this inaugural post, and explains how to put it in practice. It relies on my experience with Innotribe, and many other touch points I had with my peer “heads of innovation” in the financial industry and elsewhere. The book is now available. Thank you all for your support. It’s been quite a ride already. But I have more coming … :-)

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This is the inaugural post on my blog on Forbes.com

I choose to call this place “The Innotribe”. It’s quite natural, as I’m the co-founder of this initiative, launched by SWIFT, to enable collaborative innovation in the financial industry.

I’ll tell you much more about Innotribe here. You’ll also learn I’m an eternal optimist, so I do believe that innovation is possible, even in such established, entrenched and risk averse companies such as financial institutions.

So let me set the tone in this first post.

Just in case you haven’t come across SWIFT, the company I work for. SWIFT sets the standards for international financial transactions, and runs a highly secure and reliable network (or intranet) connecting 8,000 banks and 1,500 major corporations across the globe. The motto of the company is FNAO – “Failure is not an option”. It’s quite natural if you consider that even a couple seconds of downtime could have a major impact.

It happens so that I was the one of the people who came up with FNAO some 12 years ago. We got inspired by the Apollo 13 endeavor where everything was set in motion to bring the astronauts back to earth from a failing ship. Over the years though, FNAO slowly got a connotation of “let’s not take risks so we will not fail”.

Of course there are many other similar companies out there. So how do you innovate in such established companies?

Consider the core business of your well established company as “the Castle”.

The castle is solid, with thick walls, long lived. As is your core business. But the castle is not very agile. The goal of the people in the castle is to make sure the castle serves its purpose – they are focused on optimizing, not innovating.

What do you think happens to this person when she talks to the people in the castle?

Usually, the castle people will not be very friendly to this person. In fact – the more unfriendly the more her idea is disruptive. They might pour burning oil on her!!

So, if the castle is not the most suitable place for innovation, where should it be? If you go back to when you where a child, where was it that you could play, experiment and do all sorts of crazy things?

The sandbox of course!

The sandbox is an “incubator” – a protected place where people with ideas can “play”, or to try out their ideas, without impacting the castle. Very much like the sandboxes of our childhoods. The incubator is the place where you can try, experiment, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually learn and succeed. The key ingredients for innovation.

Innotribe does run an incubator – for SWIFT and also for the financial community. This program, funded by SWIFT, is located in a particular place, supported by specialists and experimented people available to coach intra-preneurs from SWIFT and entrepreneurs from the financial industry. If you are interested by the Innotribe incubator or you think you have an idea that could be a candidate for incubation, please see this link.

Would your company benefit from an incubator? Perhaps Innotribe can help.

So this is what this blog will be about – The Innotribe way of doing things, the adventures, the difficulties, the tribe and the people, the success stories, the smiles and tears, the passion.

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